I always wondered if they really make that much more money (after the fine) or if what they really are after is the destruction of the competitor (AMD in this case)...
Eliminating or marginalizing a major competitor always looks far better on an executive's (unofficial) resume than boosting productivity by x percent.
Nine years ago, Mr. Ellison sued Internet service providers for failing to stop a user from posting four of his stories to an online newsgroup. Since settling that suit, he has pursued more than 240 people who have posted his work to the Internet without permission. "If you put your hand in my pocket, you'll drag back six inches of bloody stump," he said.
The blog post, however, explains the rationale. In particular, adblock was intended to be a mechanism to 'restore balance' in online advertising. Not to necessarily block ALL ads, but to give users the power to block excessively annoying ads, so that webmasters would tone back ads to an acceptable level (for fear of users blocking them entirely).
In practice the way AdBlock currently works, it's just so easy to block everything and forget about it. Users then forget to ever "unblock" pages that they like and would like to support (through advertising).
The problem (if there is one) of AdBlock is its granularity. As you point out, by default, AdBlock has selected a blocklist that blocks pretty much all forms of advertising. The most obvious solution is to split up the blocklists into levels so that the user can choose which level they want upon installation of AdBlock, with the "middle" one being the default. The higher the level, the more stuff is blocked. For example:
1) Block only the most egregiously obnoxious forms of advertising (ads with sound, pop-ups) 2) Block all animated ads and javascript "floaters" 3) Block all ads over a certain size 4) Block all images 5) Block text ads
The devil is in the details however and it would require much more effort on the part of the developers of AdBlock and maintainers of block lists to implement a system like this. Plus, the more elaborate you make the system, the more opportunity you create for advertisers to try to game it. (You'll get every single one of them whining that the levels are unfair at the same time they try to hack it, etc.)
That said, I actually like the monolithic block-everything list as I think it's better for the Internet in the long run. It sends a clear message to commercial interests, "hey, we geeks designed this Internet thing in the first place and we just want to show that we still have some influence around here." Corporations are never going to stop exerting as much force and control as they can over the network and its users, so we should never stop pushing back.
2.4GHz is known "garbage" band, precisely because it is the frequency for microwave cooking ovens.
No, but that's an unfortunate side-effect. It's garbage because 2.4GHz is the resonant frequency of water, meaning its completely unsuitable for reliable long-distance communication anywhere but in a desert or for very short-range communications. (Foliage and atmospheric moisture strongly attenuate the signal.) It's unlicensed mainly because agencies and corporations didn't express any interest in it until fairly recently. They were more than happy to buy bands in more reliable parts of the spectrum.
What the FCC really ought to do is open up more unlicensed bands to fuel wireless innovation and satisfy consumer demand for more and more of their services to go wireless. But that's hardly going to happen since:
1) Corporations want to "own" as much of the usable spectrum as they can, and the FCC has always bent over backwards to sell it to them with minimal justification. 2) The FCC, being a regulatory agency and all, wants to regulate as much as possible. Making large swaths of spectrum unlicensed would effectively lessen their control and responsibility.
This is compared to the relatively few people who lived in more obscure parts of the country, like Saginaw MI (989) or Bryan TX (979).
989 wasn't added to Michigan until about 10 years ago, when most rotary phones were finally phased out. When I was growing up, most of MI was 517. There was a time when the middle digit of all area codes was only either 1 or 0 (0 indicated an area code applicable to an entire state, such as 505 in New Mexico while area codes with 1 in the middle were given to a state that needed multiple area codes such as 517, 313, and 616 in Michigan), but they had to move away from that in order to give new area codes to expanding regions. This was about the time they started requiring customers to dial area codes when placing a long-distance call within the same area code, because the older switching equipment used the "0 or 1" feature to tell whether a long distance call was to be routed within an area code or outside it.
(I am not a telecom engineer, so take this with a grain of salt.)
Where is the interaction between prime numbers and the praxeology of buying and selling securities?
The interaction is: if you find a relationship between pi and the behavior of the stock market, you will eventually wind up drilling a hole in your head. (source)
The idea of making Microsoft pay for the billions of dollars of damage caused by flaws in its products is certainly attractive, but where would this idea leave free software coders?"
This is a stupid question, and you are a stupid person for asking it.
I live in the midwest, where having a car is a necessity if you want to get anywhere in life. Literally.
In a big enough city, it might be theoretically possible to get around town on the bus or carpool to work. However, not owning a car is simply not an option here. There's no subway, train, or taxicab service running 50 miles out to auntie's home. There are no grocery stores and other necessary businesses within walking or biking distance of most residential areas.
It's nice that some people are finally thinking about putting some high-speed rail in the U.S. (thanks, auto industry, for setting us back about 60 years on that, btw), but due to the way the country is designed, that's not going to reduce the need for every single person to own a car in America. It's only going to reduce the need for air travel.
Goddamn you, Slashdot. Not 10 minutes ago, a spider literally jumped onto me and then jumped away under the desk before I could catch the thing. And then you post a story like this right before I go to bed.
What is destroying the newspapers is competition. Before the age of the Internet, the typical newspaper was a monopoly and enjoyed monopoly profits. For example, the city of Boston had only 1 major paper: the "Boston Globe". If you wanted insightful reports and commentary about the agreement signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, you must buy a copy of the "Boston Globe". The newspaper was the only game in town. (You could go to the library to read competing newspapers, but going to the library just to read newspapers is a hassle.)
I think you're confusing "monopoly" with "innovative business." A monopoly exists when one company completely controls the market that it operates in and uses its influence to make competition in that market impossible. The Boston Globe does not count as a monopoly because while they certainly may have cornered a market, there was never any barrier to another newspaper coming into town, setting up shop, and selling subscriptions and copies at news stands. It would be very hard, yes, to displace a significant portion the Globe's readership, but it would be possible. Especially if enough consumers thought that the Globe was not serving their needs. It has happened many times in many other cities.
Competition is the bedrock of capitalism. In capitalism, you thrive only if you are delivering a product that people want. If people decide they want a better product than the one you have, they go find a better one. If there is no better one, someone steps up to make one and reap the profits. This is how innovation in business works.
Also, the examples you cited are applicable not to monopolies only, but to innovative businesses or people in general. For every innovation you can think of that came from an established monopoly, I can give you 10 that came from individuals or small companies trying to compete (and succeeding) against the big dogs. AT&T was a pretty poor choice as an example, since they are widely regarded as being the benchmark for an abusive monopoly, even if their engineers did have some good ideas.
Regardless of which model is best, we must continue to have newspapers in our society. Newspapers are the bulk of the 4th branch of government. They are our eyes and ears in keeping us informed about our government. An uninformed electorate is the first step toward creating an authoritarian society.
Here you're saying that if physical print newspapers go away, then people will be uninformed. (Even moreso than they currently are, I guess.) This is a fallacy. There are only two reasons that people would stop reading newspapers:
1) They're growing dumber by the year and don't want to keep up on current events anymore, or 2) They're getting their news from somewhere else.
As tempting as it is to say otherwise, I don't think it's #1.
What is really happening here is that newspapers did not realize that the Internet would completely usurp their 200-year-old business model of writing, printing, and distributing physical newspapers. The major music companies, movies companies, and television companies are just now coming around to the fact that they have to adapt to their changing markets or die unless they want to be replaced by someone who can do it better. Mark my words, as e-book readers become more prevalent, we're going to also see book publishers sounding the alarms that their whole industry is about to die a horrible death. They'll say that book stores will cease to exist, libraries will crumble, people will starve to death, and civilization as we know it will end. The reality is that some book publishers will fail because they refused to adapt to a changing marketplace. Some will adapt and succeed, and still others will enter the market during the transition and thrive.
There should never be any special treatment given to a business or industry out of some misplaced sense of patriotism or tradition.
And, can Twitter decline an offer that is nearly three times their estimated worth?"
Sure, why not?
Why does the rumor mill, mass media, and business world assume that every company that strikes oil on the Internet need to be bought by a larger corporate entity once they've proven their worth? Not that I'm a huge fan of Twitter or anything, but the owners of the company have every goddamn reason not to sell the whole thing to behemoth like Apple.
Sure, they can cash out and get their millions of dollars now. Or, they can use their brains and make Twitter into a solid, consistent business model and make many more millions over the course of years or decades. Do you honestly think Google or Red Hat or Amazon would still be around if they sold out to the first bidder to come along? If Twitter wants to use its current success to build a foundation for a stable long-term company, they must remain agile and simply cannot let some big corporation tell them what's best.
I'm no fan of "hate speech" myself but my right to free speech overrides your right not to be offended by what I say.
This is very close to my personal mantra, except that there simply is not (and never has been) a right to not be offended.
Whatever happened to "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to my death your right to say it"? Why does it seem like Democrats are at least as effective at infringing on civil liberties as Republicans are, but never seem to get called on their BS to the same degree?
One of my problems with "the left" (and I'm a lot more liberal than conservative) is that they insist on everything being politically correct to the point that you're literally not allowed to say exactly what you mean anymore. This is particularly prevalent at public universities.
Eventually, this will all boil down to me driving in my car and saying, "Computer. Tell me: At what speed did Marty McFly need to drive to travel in time?"
If you can't answer that without looking it up, I'll have to ask you to hand in your geek card.
Still, not to bemoan the FreeBSD community's efforts, but I'm wondering if there's some kind of corporate backing, seeing as I'm certain several companies use it in critical production situations.
FreeBSD is supported by (but not run by, as far as I can tell) the FreeBSD Foundation, a non-profit. Previous sponsors of the foundation include some big names like Google, NetApp, and Juniper. Apple is missing from the list, but I know that they have donated some significant chunks of code.
Huh. Cool, but I've heard that the WSJ (or at least the web version, not sure about print) was extremely watered down after Murdoch took over and isn't any better than any other business news site now.
I would gladly pay $300 for a device that was open (read: hackable) and usable for more than just reading e-books. I know the popular readers are all based on Linux, but everything I've read about them indicates that the manufacturers are not designing or marketing them as what they are: general computing devices with somewhat limited screens. It should be possible to do anything on them that you'd do on a tablet computer (except of course video or color graphics).
It's what I call the iPhone Syndrome: Create an astonishingly capable device and then lock everyone out of it for fear that someone might conceivably do something that you didn't explicitly give them permission to do. It's like DRM for innovation.
Yes. Because nothing will boost readership like each newspaper requiring it's own custom $300 reader that doesn't work for any of the other newspapers or books.
Also, it's entirely possible (perhaps even likely) that one day, everyone will own a device capable of comfortably and conveniently reading e-books. Maybe it'll have an e-ink display, maybe it'll be some crazy mashup between a netbook and a cell phone, but it'll probably happen. As today's e-book readers become more mainstream, I think we'll start to see some competition happen. Eventually, manufacturers will market their products not just on how many books you can buy but how many different formats the reader can open. Publishers wishing to reach the largest audience will release their books in open formats to reach the largest user base possible.
I mean, assuming they don't follow in the footsteps of the RIAA and MPAA and just start suing their customers because their old business model of pushing physical products went away.
In all seriousness though, if you need this medium to make databases interesting for the reader, you're probably pandering to the wrong crowd.
It's never a waste of time to present technical material in an easier-to-digest format. Just because you can present technical information in the most terse and dry format possible doesn't mean you always should. Information doesn't care how it's transferred. What's most important is that it gets to the brain from the media (be it a book, screen, MP3 player, or whatever). There is loads of stuff that I would love to learn if it didn't mean wading through 4 years of college or 1000-page tomes.
My wife is administrative assistant at a law school. She has little in the way of technical aptitude beyond the minimum she needs to know in order to do her job. One day she was prattling on about the incompetence of the I.T. staff there when she mentioned that she was pretty much the go-to girl in the department for this thing on the computer called "sequel". With a little prodding, I eventually figured out that she was talking about SQL. There was a database application that the school had custom-designed at great cost but of course it was completely unusable by the people who had to actually use it. Its only saving grace was that you could add information and produce reports by entering in raw SQL queries. So that's what they did and over time, my wife got rather good at it. Technically speaking, she probably knows more SQL than I do, and I write trivial web apps in my spare time.
Putting aside for a moment the fact that her co-workers probably shouldn't have to deal with such an awful database program in the first place, if they really needed to learn SQL, this guide (or something like it) would certainly help them in ways that a dry technical manual never could.
The business will move because tariffs and import taxes become cheaper than domestic ones. That means unemployment grows and tax revenues drop.
I think you vastly underestimate how much American business actually takes place mostly overseas. Despite that fact that we buy more stuff, per person, than any other country in the world, practically none of it is actually made here. All kinds of services are rapidly moving offshore as well as more developing countries approach or exceed our education level. I work in the web hosting industry and it's growing increasingly lucrative to place brand-new datacenters overseas because other countries have cheaper real estate, utilities, taxes, bandwidth, and workers. I'm not arguing here whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, it just is.
This administration would be well served to tread lightly, and ensure that conducting business withing the U.S. is cheaper than foreign alternatives, else the U.S. may find itself with very little businesses conducting any business at all.
Let's make it clear here: the government is talking about curbing tax avoidance. These are taxes that the corporations are already supposed to be paying. If the company folds or goes overseas because they suddenly have to pay the money that they're supposed to, I have no sympathy for them. Whether the taxes are too high is a separate issue, but cheating on taxes and exploiting loopholes is Not Cool.
What's worse, they did it so much that now the apparently depend on it.
No. No, no, no, no, no.
They *think* they depend on it. The big shots at big companies live big lifestyles and they've brainwashed not only themselves but everyone else into believing that they have some sort of immutable right to keep those lifestyles even if earned by deception, incompetence, or just plain circumstance. Remember the huge corporate bonuses paid by companies who received federal bailout money? It was amusing to watch the companies defend those:
Corps: These bonuses support families who are used to 7-digit incomes, you wouldn't take that away from them, would you?" Gov't: Yes, we would. Corps: Oh. But we can't take away the bonuses anyway because we'll get sued. Gov't: Okay, we'll tax the executives directly to get the bonuses back. Corps: Well, if the bailout money can't go straight into our own pockets then I guess we don't want it anyway.
This, I suspect is something like how the big businesses will react to actually having to pay taxes like everyone else. It has always disturbed me that in the U.S., a corporation is legally considered a person only when it favors them and a faceless unaccountable bureaucracy when it doesn't. It's about time that we stop allowing them to have it both ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Eliminating or marginalizing a major competitor always looks far better on an executive's (unofficial) resume than boosting productivity by x percent.
He seems like a reasonable guy.
The problem (if there is one) of AdBlock is its granularity. As you point out, by default, AdBlock has selected a blocklist that blocks pretty much all forms of advertising. The most obvious solution is to split up the blocklists into levels so that the user can choose which level they want upon installation of AdBlock, with the "middle" one being the default. The higher the level, the more stuff is blocked. For example:
1) Block only the most egregiously obnoxious forms of advertising (ads with sound, pop-ups)
2) Block all animated ads and javascript "floaters"
3) Block all ads over a certain size
4) Block all images
5) Block text ads
The devil is in the details however and it would require much more effort on the part of the developers of AdBlock and maintainers of block lists to implement a system like this. Plus, the more elaborate you make the system, the more opportunity you create for advertisers to try to game it. (You'll get every single one of them whining that the levels are unfair at the same time they try to hack it, etc.)
That said, I actually like the monolithic block-everything list as I think it's better for the Internet in the long run. It sends a clear message to commercial interests, "hey, we geeks designed this Internet thing in the first place and we just want to show that we still have some influence around here." Corporations are never going to stop exerting as much force and control as they can over the network and its users, so we should never stop pushing back.
No, but that's an unfortunate side-effect. It's garbage because 2.4GHz is the resonant frequency of water, meaning its completely unsuitable for reliable long-distance communication anywhere but in a desert or for very short-range communications. (Foliage and atmospheric moisture strongly attenuate the signal.) It's unlicensed mainly because agencies and corporations didn't express any interest in it until fairly recently. They were more than happy to buy bands in more reliable parts of the spectrum.
What the FCC really ought to do is open up more unlicensed bands to fuel wireless innovation and satisfy consumer demand for more and more of their services to go wireless. But that's hardly going to happen since:
1) Corporations want to "own" as much of the usable spectrum as they can, and the FCC has always bent over backwards to sell it to them with minimal justification.
2) The FCC, being a regulatory agency and all, wants to regulate as much as possible. Making large swaths of spectrum unlicensed would effectively lessen their control and responsibility.
989 wasn't added to Michigan until about 10 years ago, when most rotary phones were finally phased out. When I was growing up, most of MI was 517. There was a time when the middle digit of all area codes was only either 1 or 0 (0 indicated an area code applicable to an entire state, such as 505 in New Mexico while area codes with 1 in the middle were given to a state that needed multiple area codes such as 517, 313, and 616 in Michigan), but they had to move away from that in order to give new area codes to expanding regions. This was about the time they started requiring customers to dial area codes when placing a long-distance call within the same area code, because the older switching equipment used the "0 or 1" feature to tell whether a long distance call was to be routed within an area code or outside it.
(I am not a telecom engineer, so take this with a grain of salt.)
The interaction is: if you find a relationship between pi and the behavior of the stock market, you will eventually wind up drilling a hole in your head. (source)
So mathematics is the study of numbers as much as computer science is the study of computers as much as biology is the study of microscopes?
(Sorry, couldn't resist parodying this particular Slashdotism.)
Computers neither have no need titles.
This is a stupid question, and you are a stupid person for asking it.
The "solution" is to put the file in a .rar or .zip archive before seeding.
Kind of a lame workaround to a lame problem, if you ask me.
I live in the midwest, where having a car is a necessity if you want to get anywhere in life. Literally.
In a big enough city, it might be theoretically possible to get around town on the bus or carpool to work. However, not owning a car is simply not an option here. There's no subway, train, or taxicab service running 50 miles out to auntie's home. There are no grocery stores and other necessary businesses within walking or biking distance of most residential areas.
It's nice that some people are finally thinking about putting some high-speed rail in the U.S. (thanks, auto industry, for setting us back about 60 years on that, btw), but due to the way the country is designed, that's not going to reduce the need for every single person to own a car in America. It's only going to reduce the need for air travel.
Goddamn you, Slashdot. Not 10 minutes ago, a spider literally jumped onto me and then jumped away under the desk before I could catch the thing. And then you post a story like this right before I go to bed.
Goddamn you, Slashdot.
I think you're confusing "monopoly" with "innovative business." A monopoly exists when one company completely controls the market that it operates in and uses its influence to make competition in that market impossible. The Boston Globe does not count as a monopoly because while they certainly may have cornered a market, there was never any barrier to another newspaper coming into town, setting up shop, and selling subscriptions and copies at news stands. It would be very hard, yes, to displace a significant portion the Globe's readership, but it would be possible. Especially if enough consumers thought that the Globe was not serving their needs. It has happened many times in many other cities.
Competition is the bedrock of capitalism. In capitalism, you thrive only if you are delivering a product that people want. If people decide they want a better product than the one you have, they go find a better one. If there is no better one, someone steps up to make one and reap the profits. This is how innovation in business works.
Also, the examples you cited are applicable not to monopolies only, but to innovative businesses or people in general. For every innovation you can think of that came from an established monopoly, I can give you 10 that came from individuals or small companies trying to compete (and succeeding) against the big dogs. AT&T was a pretty poor choice as an example, since they are widely regarded as being the benchmark for an abusive monopoly, even if their engineers did have some good ideas.
Here you're saying that if physical print newspapers go away, then people will be uninformed. (Even moreso than they currently are, I guess.) This is a fallacy. There are only two reasons that people would stop reading newspapers:
1) They're growing dumber by the year and don't want to keep up on current events anymore, or
2) They're getting their news from somewhere else.
As tempting as it is to say otherwise, I don't think it's #1.
What is really happening here is that newspapers did not realize that the Internet would completely usurp their 200-year-old business model of writing, printing, and distributing physical newspapers. The major music companies, movies companies, and television companies are just now coming around to the fact that they have to adapt to their changing markets or die unless they want to be replaced by someone who can do it better. Mark my words, as e-book readers become more prevalent, we're going to also see book publishers sounding the alarms that their whole industry is about to die a horrible death. They'll say that book stores will cease to exist, libraries will crumble, people will starve to death, and civilization as we know it will end. The reality is that some book publishers will fail because they refused to adapt to a changing marketplace. Some will adapt and succeed, and still others will enter the market during the transition and thrive.
There should never be any special treatment given to a business or industry out of some misplaced sense of patriotism or tradition.
I'll buy one when they don't come with a useless space-occupying damn physical keyboard.
Sure, why not?
Why does the rumor mill, mass media, and business world assume that every company that strikes oil on the Internet need to be bought by a larger corporate entity once they've proven their worth? Not that I'm a huge fan of Twitter or anything, but the owners of the company have every goddamn reason not to sell the whole thing to behemoth like Apple.
Sure, they can cash out and get their millions of dollars now. Or, they can use their brains and make Twitter into a solid, consistent business model and make many more millions over the course of years or decades. Do you honestly think Google or Red Hat or Amazon would still be around if they sold out to the first bidder to come along? If Twitter wants to use its current success to build a foundation for a stable long-term company, they must remain agile and simply cannot let some big corporation tell them what's best.
Hold on, hold on. Are you seriously telling me that two entirely different search engines return different answers when asked the same questions?
OH GET OUT.
This is very close to my personal mantra, except that there simply is not (and never has been) a right to not be offended.
One of my problems with "the left" (and I'm a lot more liberal than conservative) is that they insist on everything being politically correct to the point that you're literally not allowed to say exactly what you mean anymore. This is particularly prevalent at public universities.
If you can't answer that without looking it up, I'll have to ask you to hand in your geek card.
FreeBSD is supported by (but not run by, as far as I can tell) the FreeBSD Foundation, a non-profit. Previous sponsors of the foundation include some big names like Google, NetApp, and Juniper. Apple is missing from the list, but I know that they have donated some significant chunks of code.
Huh. Cool, but I've heard that the WSJ (or at least the web version, not sure about print) was extremely watered down after Murdoch took over and isn't any better than any other business news site now.
I would gladly pay $300 for a device that was open (read: hackable) and usable for more than just reading e-books. I know the popular readers are all based on Linux, but everything I've read about them indicates that the manufacturers are not designing or marketing them as what they are: general computing devices with somewhat limited screens. It should be possible to do anything on them that you'd do on a tablet computer (except of course video or color graphics).
It's what I call the iPhone Syndrome: Create an astonishingly capable device and then lock everyone out of it for fear that someone might conceivably do something that you didn't explicitly give them permission to do. It's like DRM for innovation.
I'm surprised nobody has rebutted that yet with this: Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle
Also, it's entirely possible (perhaps even likely) that one day, everyone will own a device capable of comfortably and conveniently reading e-books. Maybe it'll have an e-ink display, maybe it'll be some crazy mashup between a netbook and a cell phone, but it'll probably happen. As today's e-book readers become more mainstream, I think we'll start to see some competition happen. Eventually, manufacturers will market their products not just on how many books you can buy but how many different formats the reader can open. Publishers wishing to reach the largest audience will release their books in open formats to reach the largest user base possible.
I mean, assuming they don't follow in the footsteps of the RIAA and MPAA and just start suing their customers because their old business model of pushing physical products went away.
In all seriousness though, if you need this medium to make databases interesting for the reader, you're probably pandering to the wrong crowd.
It's never a waste of time to present technical material in an easier-to-digest format. Just because you can present technical information in the most terse and dry format possible doesn't mean you always should. Information doesn't care how it's transferred. What's most important is that it gets to the brain from the media (be it a book, screen, MP3 player, or whatever). There is loads of stuff that I would love to learn if it didn't mean wading through 4 years of college or 1000-page tomes.
My wife is administrative assistant at a law school. She has little in the way of technical aptitude beyond the minimum she needs to know in order to do her job. One day she was prattling on about the incompetence of the I.T. staff there when she mentioned that she was pretty much the go-to girl in the department for this thing on the computer called "sequel". With a little prodding, I eventually figured out that she was talking about SQL. There was a database application that the school had custom-designed at great cost but of course it was completely unusable by the people who had to actually use it. Its only saving grace was that you could add information and produce reports by entering in raw SQL queries. So that's what they did and over time, my wife got rather good at it. Technically speaking, she probably knows more SQL than I do, and I write trivial web apps in my spare time.
Putting aside for a moment the fact that her co-workers probably shouldn't have to deal with such an awful database program in the first place, if they really needed to learn SQL, this guide (or something like it) would certainly help them in ways that a dry technical manual never could.
I think you vastly underestimate how much American business actually takes place mostly overseas. Despite that fact that we buy more stuff, per person, than any other country in the world, practically none of it is actually made here. All kinds of services are rapidly moving offshore as well as more developing countries approach or exceed our education level. I work in the web hosting industry and it's growing increasingly lucrative to place brand-new datacenters overseas because other countries have cheaper real estate, utilities, taxes, bandwidth, and workers. I'm not arguing here whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, it just is.
Let's make it clear here: the government is talking about curbing tax avoidance. These are taxes that the corporations are already supposed to be paying. If the company folds or goes overseas because they suddenly have to pay the money that they're supposed to, I have no sympathy for them. Whether the taxes are too high is a separate issue, but cheating on taxes and exploiting loopholes is Not Cool.
No. No, no, no, no, no.
They *think* they depend on it. The big shots at big companies live big lifestyles and they've brainwashed not only themselves but everyone else into believing that they have some sort of immutable right to keep those lifestyles even if earned by deception, incompetence, or just plain circumstance. Remember the huge corporate bonuses paid by companies who received federal bailout money? It was amusing to watch the companies defend those:
Corps: These bonuses support families who are used to 7-digit incomes, you wouldn't take that away from them, would you?"
Gov't: Yes, we would.
Corps: Oh. But we can't take away the bonuses anyway because we'll get sued.
Gov't: Okay, we'll tax the executives directly to get the bonuses back.
Corps: Well, if the bailout money can't go straight into our own pockets then I guess we don't want it anyway.
This, I suspect is something like how the big businesses will react to actually having to pay taxes like everyone else. It has always disturbed me that in the U.S., a corporation is legally considered a person only when it favors them and a faceless unaccountable bureaucracy when it doesn't. It's about time that we stop allowing them to have it both ways.